How does apache determine what directory to show from public_html?

Question

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and have configured apache to serve from ~/public_html. I am trying to serve some directory contents over http on LAN.

When I did the following:

ln -s ../Videos/android-internals-marakana/ android-internals-marakana  

I was able to see the specified directory at localhost (in browser) with my public_html directory contents as follows:

k4rtik: public_html $ ls -l
total 12
lrwxrwxrwx 1 k4rtik k4rtik   37 May 27 15:59 android-internals-marakana -> ../Videos/android-internals-marakana/
drwxrwxr-x 2 k4rtik k4rtik 4096 May 19 13:05 cgi-bin
-rw-rw-r-- 1 k4rtik k4rtik 1406 May 19 12:20 favicon.ico
-rw-r--r-- 1 k4rtik k4rtik  178 May 19 10:21 nindex.html

But when I similarly try creating a link to android documentation with

ln -s ../bin/android-sdk-linux/docs/ droid-docs

I get the symbolic link in directory listing but not at localhost in browser.

I have checked everything I could on my own - directory permissions, validity of the link, typing the dir name in the url directly (received Forbidden - You don't have permission to access /droid-docs on this server. there).

Any clue on what's going on and how to get this to work? Is it because bin folder is somewhat special as compared to other folders in my home directory?

Answer 1

As Ulrich Dangel points out in his comment above - the whole directory hierarchy leading to the required directory should be accessible to apache in order for it to serve the directory and its listing.

I had to chmod ~/bin/android-sdk-linux to 775 which was originally set to 770.